This weekend we have a new Wowhead Weekly, 6.2 hotfixes, and the Road to BlizzCon Tournament!

Wowhead Weekly

Wowhead Weekly #47 covers all the 6.2.2 PTR news, including holiday updates and new mounts and pets!

Wowhead Weekly is a World of Warcraft podcast with Wowhead Site Manager Perculia and Downtime Tuesday host TradeChat where all the recent Blizzard news and Wowhead developments are discussed. You can subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see every episode. We also livestream each episode Friday afternoons, starting at 6pm EST, on twitch.tv/wowhead. If you subscribe to our twitch channel, you can get Pepe and rocket emotes!

Road to BlizzCon: Final NA Qualifiers Broadcast

During the Road to BlizzCon stream, PvP designer Brian Holinka answered some questions about Legion PvP on http://www.twitch.tv/wow with Jackson “Bajheera” Bliton. Below are the highlights:

Positives of Warlords PvP: Happy with the addition of skirmishes—if you don’t have a team, you could engage in arena gameplay. Strongboxes - you can get gear in unpredictable way. Group Finder is also great to find people with similar interests.

Negatives of Warlords PvP: Ashran fell short - in the PR phase of Warlords, people were excited about world PvP and the WoW team didn’t execute on that. Mistakes were made along the way, such as trying to make Ashran rewards feel special and adding exclusive items there. However, 6.2 Ashran feels a lot better than 6.0 Ashran and the team learned a lot about rewards and driving players to fight each other.

How did gear work in Warlords? Goals in MoP and WoD was to make sure that we kept pace with PvE. Goals are very different - in PvE, you want meaningful increase in power. In PvP, you want to make sure that gap isn’t big. There’s the dual item level - which worked but was ugly. Invisible ilvl ceiling, hard to see stats. Players that weren’t full-time PvP felt compelled to get PvP gear to participate. System is cool, but fell short.

Gamescom had statement “no PvP gear.”—what’s up with that? By no PvP gear, the devs mean that there is no gear with resilience, PvP power, dual item level. They want to get away from sense of “I’ve got to have PvP gear to participate.” Gear is gear. After a certain ilvl, your gear increases your power by a very small amount, so a high ilvl does not mean you are drastically overpowered.

They want gear to mean a lot less in PvP. In Legion, when you enter a BG or Arena, all your stats based on your specialization, not on your gear. Your stats come from a specific template which gives Blizzard tremendous tuning power—unprecedented for WoW. This is the biggest change to WoW PVP since arenas were introduced. Between stats and the PvP talent trees, this should allow Blizzard greater freedom for PvP specific mechanics and better class balance.

Why PvP talents in Legion? Gear is the current progression system in PvP. When you get your gear, you’re done. However, you should feel that you’re working to a goal, and you need compelling rewards—PvP talents that you get every few levels. There’s currently a sense of satisfaction when you get a new piece of gear, pick an enchant, or gem—customization is fun. In Legion, the customization fun comes from talents instead.

In Legion, there will be no active trinkets, no set bonuses, no enchants in PvP. That sense of “choice” comes from the PvP talent system. These gear changes should lead to sustained damage being a larger part of PvP—vs the current situation where when everything lines up at once, you do very strong damage, but otherwise are a wet noodle.

Why do you lose PvP talents when you gain prestige? It was important to have a cost associated with prestige.

Gladiator’s Medallion showed up as a PvP talent option - what does that mean? The CC trinket seems to be fundamental option—so now it’s an easy talent to get. Other talents available like—passive reduction of CC.

What does this mean for Human Racial? Not sure—perhaps we don’t change it, and we offer alternative for humans. Or the racial + other options is too good, so they have to think about it.

Are we still getting gear from PvP? Do PvPers have to raid for best gear? In PvP, they don’t want gear to get out of control. This lets everyone have an equal playing field. However, PvP should be an avenue where you get the best PvP gear from PvP. There are still avenues to ensure you get great PvP gear, but it’s not as easy as it is now. Can’t go into details now —higher-rated players can easily get PvP gear, more so than a lower-rated player. The guy who is super-serious about PvP is going to push hard to get gear.

How does this affect WoW as an esport? Empower the people out there who want to create events for WoW to do it. Spectator mode is a great step towards that.

Blizzard

The Road to BlizzCon marches on! Three North American teams have already qualified for the Americas Regionals tournament later this year, and this Saturday, the top 8 teams from our final North American Online Qualifier Cup will fight for their chance to join them.

What’s more, Senior Game Designer Brian Holinka will stop by to talk about World of Warcraft PvP design, including lessons learned from Warlords of Draenor and a glimpse at future plans for World of Warcraft: Legion.

It all starts on Saturday, August 15 at 2 p.m. Pacific time (check here for your local time zone). More information on the brackets, as well as the teams that are competing, is available on Battlefy. Who will rise up and claim the three remaining spots at the Americas Regionals?

PvP

Class

Mastery: should now correctly have its damage absorption reduced by Dampening.

Further explanations to the Dia changes were provided:

Watcher

There's definitely a messy history here. Our aim throughout has been to provide a more consistent experience, but there have been other bugs exposed as we applied various fixes in pursuit of that goal, which required new fixes, and so forth. Fingers crossed, but we think we're at a final state at this point.

The core of the original problem lay in Dia's nature as a Shadow-school-exclusive caster with a variety of spells, one of which (Void Bolt) needed to respect school lockout when interrupted, and Mark of the Necromancer's exponential growth that makes Reap timing very important.

A history of changes here:

Original state: Nightmare Visage respected school lockout, and because Reap could not be cast during Nightmare Visage, the exact timing and quantity of Void Bolt interrupts could cause huge variance in Reap's timing, and thus the damage taken from Mark of the Necromancer. Some players figured out an exact interrupt order to reliably cause Reap to be delayed so that it started coming after Mark, pretty much trivializing Mark for the rest of the fight.

Reap Hotfix #1 (August 3): Because it was a problem that the danger posed by Mark/Reap could vary drastically from pull to pull, we made Visage ignore school lockout, which made its timing more predictable, and thus Reap's timing as well. We realized that many guilds had only killed the fight by manipulating the timing to get the optimal Reap/Mark order, so we also nerfed Mark damage at the same time to help offset the potential increase in difficulty.

Post-Hotfix #1: This mostly addressed the problem, though quirks in AI timing meant that it was still rarely possible to get the "easy" spell order. The new timing exposed an even worse bug, however. Dia could not Reap while Darkness was occurring. Previously, delayed Visage casts tended to cause these two abilities to not intersect. But after our hotfix, there was a predictable window, about 6:30 into the fight, where they would line up, and the result was to delay Dia's fifth Reap by a significant amount, causing Mark damage to ramp out of control and almost certainly cause a wipe. Not good.

Hotfix #2 (August 11): We fixed the issue with Darkness preventing Reap, and rebuilt the way Reap/Mark work, and now force Dia to re-cast Mark after each Reap so that they can never get desynced and the variance in Mark damage from pull to pull should go way down.

Post-Hotfix #2: The change to Darkness/Reap interaction also increased the effective duration of Darkness (a side-effect, not the core intended change), which increased the damage and positioning disruption from that ability.

Hotfix #3 (August 13): We're going to be reducing the duration of Darkness to match how it used to be prior to Hotfix #2.

We're generally hesitant to buff fights once they're in the wild, and didn't set out here with the intent of making the encounter strictly more difficult (hence the offsetting nerf to Mark damage in Hotfix #1 above). The goal was always to reduce large variation in the fight's difficulty from pull to pull, which makes for a frustrating experience. There were admittedly a few more pitfalls along the way than we expected. Please let us know if you continue to experience any frustrations or apparent bugs here.

Comments

Comment by sydail

The dragonhawk in the video is actually a photo of Blue Dragonhawk, but other than that great video as always!

Comment by dmbardal

on 2015-08-15T13:49:07-05:00

It would be awesome if the Yeti would be green. Grinch-y.

I love the 300 mounts reward though. Finally something that looks decent. I'm not too happy about it beeing a dragon though. I would rather see it was something unique, not only in colorscheme, but also in model.

Comment by Winfree

on 2015-08-15T14:26:42-05:00

I don't doubt the 300 mounts reward is a decoy.. only saying that cause they once said emerald drake was going to be the reward for 250 mounts.

Comment by cucmw5

on 2015-08-15T19:29:56-05:00

That phasing mirror sounds like a direct reference to the Magic Mirror from Zelda: A Link to the Past.

For those who haven't somehow yet played the classic, a world of peace and fantasy quickly gets taken over by a dark wizard. However, before he can merge his vision of the world with the one the hero (Link) lives in, he has to do so from the dark and evil alternative reality of the world. The map layout would generally be the same between the two realities, but where once there were towns and forests would be ruins and swamps, etc. And to help you progress between obstacles and paths accessible only in certain parts of each world, a Magic Mirror was presented to Link so he could swap back and forth between worlds. It was a super cool concept for an SNES game at the time.

That A Link to the Past and Warlords of Draenor hold SO many similar themes in terms of ruined/uncorrupted worlds and parallel timelines, this Mirror you two discovered sounds exactly like that.

Comment by GarbageJuice

on 2015-08-15T20:02:38-05:00

This is the chance to bring back glorious WoW PvP. I'm rooting for you, WoW-PvP-design-team. You got the short straw in Borelords; come back with a vengeance for Legion!

Comment by Foulbark

on 2015-08-15T20:35:53-05:00

Thanks for

That phasing mirror sounds like a direct reference to the Magic Mirror from Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Thanks for the info! I never played that game, but it's neat to know!

Comment by Foxpaw

on 2015-08-15T22:42:08-05:00

What I love most about the suggested changes to PVP; Theoretically this means they've more or less split PVP and PVE mechanics so they can FINALLY stop breaking one when trying to fix the other. (Something we've only been asking for them to do for, what, 9+ years now)

Comment by menace97

on 2015-08-15T23:24:31-05:00

What I love most about the suggested changes to PVP; Theoretically this means they've more or less split PVP and PVE mechanics so they can FINALLY stop breaking one when trying to fix the other. (Something we've only been asking for them to do for, what, 9+ years now)

I agree! It is really nice to see them taking some of these suggestions to heart. It seems like Blizzard is finally going back on some things they said they would NEVER do. Personally, I find it reassuring to see they are not being so stubborn this time (hopefully) and willing to (perhaps) make some fan-supported changes.

Comment by kragthang

on 2015-08-16T01:53:56-05:00

I don't doubt the 300 mounts reward is a decoy.. only saying that cause they once said emerald drake was going to be the reward for 250 mounts.

They only changed it after people complained too much.

Comment by Grabovsky

on 2015-08-16T04:50:51-05:00

I agree! It is really nice to see them taking some of these suggestions to heart. It seems like Blizzard is finally going back on some things they said they would NEVER do. Personally, I find it reassuring to see they are not being so stubborn this time (hopefully) and willing to (perhaps) make some fan-supported changes.

I think this is what went wrong in WoD, not listening to fans. True, it is blizz's game, and we should be happy with what they give us, but at a certain point they need to listen to what we want to play.

Comment by AravenQueen

on 2015-08-16T05:50:29-05:00

I agree! It is really nice to see them taking some of these suggestions to heart. It seems like Blizzard is finally going back on some things they said they would NEVER do. Personally, I find it reassuring to see they are not being so stubborn this time (hopefully) and willing to (perhaps) make some fan-supported changes.

I think this is what went wrong in WoD, not listening to fans. True, it is blizz's game, and we should be happy with what they give us, but at a certain point they need to listen to what we want to play.

problem is, everyone has their own opinions...and then you have the toddlers who storm like a raging rapids over everything, good news is, with the halloween and christmas updates, I believe this patch will hit before halloween which means YAY flying!

Comment by Norrell

on 2015-08-16T09:14:24-05:00

"The Big Love Rocket is the bane of my existence!"I almost died when I heard that. fmao

Comment by medivh888alst

on 2015-08-16T16:42:34-05:00

with the rogues hall, maybe if there Really like the underground hideaway idea and thieve worked on it a lot they could make sure there's no sewer water and actually put it under ravenholdt manor, that way they don't need to go back on resources and we can have an upgraded manor :D i think its a pretty good compromise

Comment by Eneathrielia

on 2015-08-17T07:15:31-05:00

Have Blizzard seriously lost their mind with PvP changes? No PvP gear, no possiblity to tune your stats, gems, enchants to actually put effort to your toon? Some **** talents are all we get as "reward"? What will you have now as a chance to improve your stats, prioritize yourself into mastery for example? Nothing of course. Blizz will set up your stats as THEY THINK they should be, meaning multistrike and haste for Arms warrior.

I do not see a -single- reason why a person who dings a fresh 110 with green **** gear should compete with a person who tryhards PvP for a longer time and ACTUALLY DESERVED the upper hand over those "greenies".

And here we go to another problem. Mythic raiders. I do not have time to go raid every day in a week for 4 hours+ to down mythics and thus have advantage in PVP by doing PVE. Imagine this "awesome system" in current WoD. When you lvl up, you have approximately 600-610 ilvl. Mythic raids drop 735 ilvl, meaning PVER would have around 27% more stat power than a PvPer. That you call fair?

If this is gonna pass, PvP is over.

Comment by Maxwelldemonic

on 2015-08-17T08:45:07-05:00

I'm really glad to see their explanation for what was going on with Dia. Honestly, that fight was pretty tame on heroic to begin with even if you didn't cheese the sync time.

Comment by rinkworks

on 2015-08-17T09:24:44-05:00

Eneathrielia, item ilevels aren't linear. An X% jump in ilevel does NOT imply an X% jump in stats: the actual stat difference might be more or less. For Legion, they've already said that the difference between 110 greens and 110 raiding gear will only be about 7% in PvP. They also said, in this very post even, that gear will still be obtainable by progressing in PvP. So by the time a raider actually manages to accumulate a bunch of mythic gear, a dedicated PvPer will have also obtained gear and unlocked a bunch of PvP talents besides.

Finally, I don't know why you offhandedly discount the talents. Is it that inconceivable to you that someone who has progressed in PvP and unlocked a ton of different abilities and talents might just crush someone who doesn't have any of them? Is it inconceivable to you that a talent tree with different options might actually provide more choice, not less, than gear stats does?

Change is scary, sure. And it may yet turn out that the way Blizzard implements this new PvP paradigm will be all wrong. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with it on a theoretical level.

Comment by Bluntpower

on 2015-08-17T10:30:13-05:00

Change is scary, sure

it wouldn't be nearly as scary if they actually came up with something NEW.

just copy paste perks from COD isn't something new, just lazy, like everything they did in the last 2 years.

Comment by jpop2887

on 2015-08-17T10:33:30-05:00

I'm loving all the hype for the new expansion. One thing I really wish to see is better preparedness on launch day. Those server issues were a nightmare when WoD launched, hopefully Blizz sees the issue and has a better way to handle the inevitable influx of players logging in at once.

Comment by Sflange

on 2015-08-17T11:16:59-05:00

Change is scary, sure

it wouldn't be nearly as scary if they actually came up with something NEW.

just copy paste perks from COD isn't something new, just lazy, like everything they did in the last 2 years.

You actually think that they're copying perks from CoD? Have you even seen the Gamescom reveal? Literally none of the perks they showed have anything to do with CoD at all. They're about customizing your character by unlocking new useful abilities and perks that will be helpful in PvP. Get your head on straight and come back when you know about the things you criticize.

Comment by XakiBear

on 2015-08-17T11:56:47-05:00

If "gear" is just "gear" for pvp and we are going to just become walking tune-able numbers... then I want the same treatment for PvE. I should be able to walk into an end game Mythic raid wearing greens and have my "gear" attuned to the guy who has more time to raid than me or maybe he is better at the PvE aspect of the game than me.

So this way I can walk into a Mythic raid and actually be epic and amazing. I can clear the whole place out because I know how to not stand in the fire. Not because I worked for gear. Not because I did the early launch raids and heroics.

I have always believed you have to not only be skilled at pvp to be good at it, but also use your skill to prove yourself over a length of time to get good gear. The gear doesn't make you 2200. It does help yes, but skill has always been the most important factor. Gear has always been something to work for. It separates me from the guy or gal that only raids, or raids some but hardly ever does PvP content.

Maybe I am way off here. I just feel like removing pvp gear or making it mean little to nothing is going to hurt PvP in the long run. I'm also worried about world PvP which is one of my favorite things. They said "Battlegrounds and Arenas" your stat template will scale or w/e... Well what about in the open world when you engage in battle? Those green and blues you got from dungeons don't mean anything and the person who raids the most will kill you in open world with their mythic gear?

I guess it's still a little early to tell. I don't raid. I haven't since end Cata. I strictly PvP after I level through dungeons and questing. I fully expect those that raid to hate or bash me with their mythic shields. These are just my opinions and I'm not going to get offended if you disagree.

TLDR- Please don't break/remove PvP gear and please don't ruin world PvP. Don't force me to raid to be able to compete in world pvp.